Self-Talk: Are you your biggest bully?
Why we are so mean to ourselves and what we can do to improve it.
We are told that we are the product of the 5 people we spend the most time with. This is true, they shape our ideas, beliefs, values and our mentality. They either dream big or think small. They either tell you you can’t or they help you figure out how you can. They make you feel better about yourself when you’re down or knock you down a peg when you’re getting too big. So it’s important to make sure you’re spending time with people who are net-positive and who help you become a better person than you are currently.
But there’s one person who you spend more time with than anyone else. The person who speaks to you constantly and who you literally cannot escape. This person has the biggest impact on who we become. And that is yourself.
Most of us speak to ourselves very unkindly. In ways we would never dream to speak to our friends, or honestly even our enemies. When we make a mistake the voice in our head begins to lambast us. Tearing us down and calling us an idiot. If we see a pretty girl walking down the street who we want to talk to, our inner voice immediately begins making up scenarios of horrific rejection which are so cruel that they're unlikely to ever happen in real life and so we don’t do it. When we want to quit our job to start a business with a really good idea we’ve had for a while our mind tells us we’re going to fail and end up completely homeless and starving, even though if it doesn’t work out we could always just find another job.
This voice gets particularly nasty when it comes to creative projects, we may want to sing, dance, write or make YouTube videos but the very thought of pursuing these things conjures up imaginations of the entire world laughing at us, and mocking us for even trying in the first place. Our inner voice begins to berate us forever believing that anyone would be interested in what we have to make. And tells us to just stick to what is familiar and not be such an idiot.
So why is this little voice so mean to us? Is it, not an extension of us itself? Surely with it being our brain, it should be trying to help us instead of tearing us down?
Surprisingly, although it lives in us. this voice didn’t originate from inside of us. Think back to your childhood if you have the memory. Do you remember beating yourself up for spilling over a pile of toys, or messing on your shirt when you ate? No, you likely don’t. And most likely no one in the world at the time did either. Your mother probably giggled when you were a child and spilt on yourself and smiled kindly while she cleaned you up. Your father laughed when you knocked over your toys and playfully pulled a face of shock at the mess.
But then you grow up and you aren’t as cute as you once were, now when you spill on your shirt, your mother shouts at you and begins complaining about how she has to now get the stain out. When you spill your toys your father yells at you to pick them up and to stop being so messy. And with each of these negative scenarios, a little monster begins to form in the back of our minds. And with no context and little ability to process the situation with our underdeveloped brain, we begin to think that us making a mistake makes us a bad person, and the little monster in our heads begins to shame us, even when we’re alone because it believes that every mistake we make is a matter of life or death. When we get bullied at school, the monster grows, telling us we don’t deserve to have friends. When we get a bad grade it tells us we’re stupid. When we get rejected by our crush it informs us that we’re unloveable, ugly and will be alone forever.
And this monster continues to grow and become ugly until one day it no longer needs anything bad to happen externally for it to shame us. So we walk around with a little monster constantly telling us how worthless we are. And with enough reinforcement, we may even begin to believe it.
But not everything that happens to us is negative, we sometimes win and are liked and loved by others, yet our mind stays quiet in celebrating our victories, or the little monster may emerge to tell us we don’t deserve the win anyway. So why is this negative voice so loud?
It’s based on the way our brain works, it is biased to remember negative things because their cost is so much higher. When we win we feel good and our status may slightly increase, but if we lose or humiliate ourselves our status drops massively. We may lose friends or loved ones and end up unhappy and alone. If you think of it within the context of a tribe, If we constantly were to make mistakes and blunders and always embarrass ourselves, potentially causing a hunt to fail or everyone to be put in danger. we would be kicked out of the tribe and likely starve on our own. So our brains needed to make sure we conformed and didn’t become social outcasts, and those who didn’t have these internal filters all died out leaving only the overthinkers around. But we don’t live with such severe social consequences anymore. So we don’t need to be so harsh with ourselves.
This changes the little monster in our minds. It isn’t trying to hurt us. It’s trying to protect us. It just doesn’t know how to do it nicely because it believes the consequence of it not doing its job is our death.
And if we look closer at the monster it’s
just us as a child twisted and deformed from all the bitterness and negativity. And all they need is a hug and reassurance that everything is going to be okay. It’s okay to try and fail, no one is going to mock us, and even if they do it doesn’t matter because we won’t die from it.
With this knowledge, we can begin to observe our negative thoughts, look at them and realise that they come from a place of misguided love. We can reassure ourselves that everything will be okay. We aren’t useless idiots for spilling coffee on our shirts, we are able and worthy to accomplish our goals. we can go talk to that pretty girl because we are worthy of love and so are they and it would be selfish to not even try because they might want to talk to us too, but they also have a little monster holding them back.
Eventually, after some time, with a lot of encouragement, that little monster will clean itself up, get a little bit less intimidating and become our biggest ally, telling us we can. It will become a helpful friend instead of a hindering foe and the person we spend the most time with, ourselves, will become such a positive part of our lives that it will be almost impossible to fail.
Godspeed.
Great post, man! I would just like to add that we have to constantly remind ourselves to not take this bitter inner voice so seriously – otherwise we'll risk sabotaging everything that we do.